standing for these. The decision of the Nazi Law Association, which the Government is carrying out, to eliminate Jews and Marxists from the legal profession, adds “except those who served in the front line trenches or lost sons in the war.”
But great numbers of Jews in Germany would leave. There is no shame in doing that. The Huguenots left, and other people who found themselves oppressed or threatened left. But where are they to go? To Poland? Where at the very moment when the Club of Jewish Deputies published its fiery protest against the anti-Jewish attacks in Germany, the same thing was happening under their noses? Where anti-Jewish rioting recurs every year since the foundation of the new Polish State, often several times in the year?
Are they to go to England, France, America? Will any large number of Jews be admitted to any of these countries? Instead of protesting, why not try to get permission from the governments to admit a certain number of victims? But would not any large influx of Jews from Germany to France, England, America, Spain or Timbuctoo, as economic conditions now stand, cause trouble? Would not even the Jews in these countries very soon resent it? It is human nature. I remember how the Belgian refugees, hailed at the outbreak of War as “our noble allies,” became in six months in England a blasted nuisance.
OTHER CENTERS OF ANTI-SEMITISM
The Jews in Russia did not take it all lying down. The Bund fought many a battle with the pogromists. But the protest meetings are neither one thing nor the other. They are just an opportunity for some loud-voiced orators to mouth demagogic phrases. If it isn’t Hitlerism in Germany, it is anti-Jewish riots in Poland, or Austria, or Roumania, or Lithuania, or Latvia, or the British Government for stopping immigration to Palestine, or allowing the 1929 massacres or not extending preference to Palestine, or Soviet Russia for the dollar inquisition against Jews, or America for shutting the doors against immigration, or the U. S. Army and Navy Register for “scurrilously attacking Jews as unpatriotic,” or the anti-Jewish aspersions of revivalist preachers down in Chattanooga. It has got so much into the blood of the protesters that if there is a momentary lull, they use it to start a rampaging campaign to get the “Merchant of Venice” removed from the school curriculum.
Not because the things that are being done now are right and protest is wrong, not in order to minimize or defend outrages, but because we must face realities, because constant hysterical screeching and flaunting our injuries in the eyes of the world will only make the world conclude that we are a nuisance, because the world has plenty of trouble and griefs of its own just now and can’t be bothered to attend to ours, because better than twenty protest speeches and denunciatory articles that are carefully picked out by the enemy press and made to serve for justification of further oppression, is one solid constructive achievement that will give some of those poor harrassed Jews “who cannot or will not stay in the lands where they are” a haven of refuge, an opportunity of living more freely, and earning their bread.
THE SOLUTION
The Jews of German origin in America, the Schiffs, the Warburgs, the Strauses, the Ochses, no doubt will see to their kin, and if these, with their great resources of capital and capacity shoud go to America they will give America as great service as their older American cousins have done and are doing. No doubt they would provide opportunities for many more humbler folk, industrious and able, as well as stimulating opportunities for native Americans, too.
If 50,000 German Jews could go into America, and a few thousand into England and other countries, it would not only solve their problem, but would give a new sense of dignity to the hundreds of thousands who must remain in Germany. For it would show them and it would show the German rulers that what Germany despises other countries do not and will take from them. It would be the most practical and most sobering answer to the German movement to exclude Jews.
If Hitler is strong the world will make its peace with him, and our protest will be lost in the air. The world eventually made its peace with Horthy Hungary, with Mussolini Italy, with Ogpu Russia,
ECONOMIC WAR IS RASH
The protests against pogroms did not sweep away Petlura, Denikin, Koltchak and the rest. The Red Army swept them away, not without a few pogroms of its own on the way.
Is any country going to war with Germany because of the ill-treatment of Jews? Even economic war in these days of desperate seeking of markets? And how much of the economic boycott will recoil on the heads of the Jewish manufacturers and workers who will remain in Germany and have to earn their living even as degraded citizens?
It is sad to think that might and self-interest still count, but we must look the facts in the face. And what we have to do now is to see how we can best help the German Jews, how we can best help them to work out their own fate, if we cannot help them in any other way. But certainly, declaiming against Hitler and listening to oratorical fireworks is not the way.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
